Posts Tagged ‘smart phones’

BlackBerry hasn’t had a good few years, seeing their stocks plummet, their technology fail and their sales diminish. Nobody sees BlackBerry as a ‘go to’ brand like they used to, but we’ve come up with three ways the company could reclaim that former success.

Fix the design Does a BlackBerry phone have a physical QWERTY phone or not? The company has flipped the keyboard design on and off like a light switch over the past year and the result has been far from successful.

There are very few phones being released which actually have a physical keyboard. Is that a sign of the times? We think so, and BlackBerry isn’t letting the age of the QWERTY keyboard pass, and it is paying for it.

The Canadian company needs to focus on releasing a range of phones with a responsive and vivid touch screen that is reliable. Even with the latest releases, we’ve been given touch screens which aren’t as responsive as other manufacturers, and that flaw is driving people away.

To put it simply, BlackBerry needs to fix the design issues, if it doesn’t, it’s unlikely that the firm will exist this time next year.

Change its Audience Another thing BlackBerry could do is change its audience. For the past few years BlackBerry has been targeting younger audiences, losing track of where its original success was found: in the business sector.

Instead of trying to focus on the teenage audience, why doesn’t BlackBerry head back to basics and become the business phone manufacturer on the market. When business people are looking for a new handset, you won’t see them hunting around for the best phone deals, instead, they will know to head straight for a BlackBerry. This is the ideal situation for BlackBerry and what it should be striving to secure.

Sort out the OS If your own system doesn’t run well, it’s unlikely people will buy your phone, simple as that. The BlackBerry 10 operating system wasn’t bad in all fairness, but before that BlackBerry was a much maligned system, thanks to multiple issues from lack of apps to constant crashing.

Windows Phone 8 was released at a similar time to BlackBerry 10, so why has it stuck around when BB10 hasn’t? Because WP8 secured the most important apps, and released the most important updates to its users when BlackBerry didn’t, and now it is stealing away the users BlackBerry once had.

If BlackBerry is to get out of the mess it’s found itself in, it needs to keep improving its OS in an effort to bring more customers in. If BlackBerry improves its OS further, it could begin to compete effectively against the likes of Windows Phone, Android and Apple, just like the good old days. If BlackBerry does any one of these three things, it might be able to climb out of this hole it’s stuck in. Hopefully we might just be seeing BlackBerry make a resurgence this year if it gets things right.